Elena Grewal, Head of Data Science at Airbnb

As the leader of Airbnb’s Data team, Elena is responsible for driving the strategy for how Airbnb uses data for decision making and infuses products and processes with algorithms. Before Airbnb she completed a PhD in Education from Stanford, studying social networks in schools and building statistical models to predict when students would form friendships with a student from a different race or socioeconomic background. She started as one of the first data scientists at the company, where her initial work set up frameworks for understanding the impact of company initiatives and to improve the user experience by using data at scale. She led efforts to diversify the data science team and writes and speaks about building diverse technical teams.